Five insights on the real impact of AI transformation, from Josh Bersin

Josh Bersin gives the closing keynote at HR Tech 2025 in Las Vegas. (Photo by Breion Russell)

Maximising the opportunities of AI transformation—and confronting the challenges it presents—drove the majority of discussion at HR Tech last week, including by leading industry analyst Josh Bersin.

In his closing keynote, Bersin said HR is at a critical moment, with an HR tech makret that is being revolutionised and a new mandate to re-envision how work of the future is done.

What does AI transformation look like?

AI transformation is currently happening in four phases, Bersin said:

1. Assistance: Employees are leveraging tools like ChatGPT and Galileo for individual parts of their jobs, typically finding 15-30% improvements.

2. Automation: As the workforce becomes more comfortable interacting with such tools, organisations ae redesigning jobs to flow tasks to both humans and agents, improving processes by up to 50%.

3. Multi-function agents: As multiple agents are deployed, organisations can fully “re-engineer jobs”, stitching together processes across functions, and boosting improvements of 100-200%.

4. Autonomy: At this end stage, organisations can reap up to 300% in improvements, as AI agents manage the work, and humans manage the agents, Bersin said.

Five takes on the implications of AI transformation

As organisations progress through this journey, it is reshaping the job market and driving the ongoing consolidation of HR tech organisations, with the biggest players vying to become leading AI transformation firms, Bersin said.

His perspectives on this shifting landscape include:

AI is not really taking all the jobs

While AI transformation is often in the headlines as a driver of job losses, Bersin said, the root is more that organisations are slowing their hiring spend as they anticipate increased investments in AI. At the same time, he said, some organisations may be pointing the finger at AI for headcount reductions—but are simply using the moment to address already existing financial concerns.

You can’t train for AI transformation

Giving employees the space to experiment with AI is critical. “You can’t train somebody for AI,” he said, likening the process to learning how to use an Excel spreadsheet: Just looking at it does not teach you how to use it. “You have to literally use AI to learn what it does well and where it can go,” he said.

READ MORE: How enterprise AI is reshaping EX, according to Josh Bersin

AI won’t be in the driver’s seat

Be realistic about the direction of AI, Bersin advised, including how it will impact management. AI transformation will create the need for “supermanagers” who can be facilitators, coachers and enablers of AI use—but, “they’ll still be doing management. I don’t think we’re all going to be managed by bots.”

Talent management needs to shift

As AI changes jobs and workflows, HR needs to change its own philosophies, including around talent management. Unlike traditional talent management practices focused on each employees’ hire-to-retire lifecycle, AI transformation means HR should strive toward a more collective “talent density,” managing with the goal of creating a higher-performing workforce.

Job redesign is the critical differentiator

Organisations that are able to leverage the influence of AI transformation to effectively eliminate some jobs while changing and changing others are “much, much, much more profitable,” Bersin said. It is a strategic imperative for HR to understand where employees will need to move, the reskilling requirements and how to redeploy them. “If there’s anything that’s going to hold you back in AI transformation,” Bersin said, “it’s not going to be the tech—it’s going to be this.”

About the Author:

Jen Colletta is Managing Editor at HR Executive, where this article was first published.